Samsung GX-10 10.2MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-55mm Schneider D-XENON Lens

This is a great camera. I've been a photographer for over 40 years. I'm taking better pictures than ever before since getting it about a month ago. I have only scratched the surface of the creative control it offers. It is big and heavy enough and has a really solid feeling build.

Battery life is great it took me more than couple of weeks to shoot enough images to need to replace the battery with a fresh one. I instinctively bought three batteries. I like keeping spares on hand for any camera. If you're budget conscious you might consider recharging between shoots with only one battery pack and just keeping the thing topped up. It has plenty of capacity. I found I can remove and replace the SD chip or the battery even without removing the quick mounting plate for my tripod from the bottom of the GX10 body.

At the time of purchase, the fact that this camera is such a great value for money made me worry about quality. That worry was misplaced. It's a great deal and a great camera.

The Kit
Nothing has been disappointing so far, other than the 18-55mm kit lens. It simply is not good enough. I just tried it, printed some proofs and put it back in the box. It sits on the shelf waiting for me to choose it if I decide to take pictures at a riot or during a volcanic eruption. If you actually need this level of quality in a DSLR camera, I suggest you choose a different lens.

The great GX10 body is compatible with pretty much everything in the Pentax K mount family, and so you simply need to buy any of many of the very good to excellent lenses in that huge list. The Anti-shake is in the camera so all of them will have the advantage of that. You need not go to the very top of the Pentax line to assemble a really useable set up. I settled on the F1.4 Pentax 50mm which is a very good, ultra fast, and very inexpensive portrait lens priced way below it's value. I added the Pentax 18-250 and the Sigma 12-24 zooms. I shoot a lot of buildings and interiors and the 12-24 gets a lot of use. These are probably not the absolute ultimate for optical quality on the Pentax and compatible w/ K mount lists, but they are more than good enough. I am printing great images and I'm not even thinking about upgrading anything.

If you're on a budget and need an all-around does everything pretty well one lens setup, get the Pentax 18-250 zoom. It might be a long long time before you need anything else. Pay attention to the manual and learn to use the software controls on the camera. You have a lot of camera control over sharpness, color and contrast to creatively augment and moderate the products of the lens optics and their excellent coatings.

The Body Controls and Software
The controls are logically arranged and comfortable to use. the Software is well documented and settings are made accessible with well placed push button rocker switch and scroll wheel controls that activate logical menu groups. You really can adjust things on the fly while shooting. You need only a few seconds. Changing white balance to fix the color balance to suit the weather or indoor lighting is a very quick fix. Touch the Fn button and a couple of clicks of your thumb. You can switch to effective WB presets for sun ,clouds, cloudy, shade,three variations for flourescents and incandescent plus a few more. It takes much longer for me to type it here than it takes to use it even the first time. Switching shooting modes to fix aperture or speed controlling dept of field or motion blur is also very quick and easy.

As you learn and internalize the controls you just get speedier and able to use more and more of the feature set. I really like using this Camera more and more as time passes.

The RAW feature is easy to use, even one picture at a time. Use it. The GX10's RAW feature offers an important window of added potential that will allow you to make the very best images this camera is capable of.

I would buy the GX-10 again, without the 18-55 lens, with no hesitation.

We purchased this camera as an upgrade for our aged Minolta Dimage 500. The Minolta takes great pictures, but is rather limited as far as creativity and doesn't do well with landscapes. Living in Colorado, my wife and I take a lot of landscape pics and wanted something to accurately capture the beauty we see.
As with most things, I did a lot of research on DSLR's before we made this purchase. I looked at professional and consumer reviews for Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony/Minolta and Pentax/Samsung. I was surprised to find the big names didn't do so well in the mid-range catagory (D40, XTi, A100). From everything I read, you would need to move up to the high end models of the big boys (at over $1000) to come close to the quality of the Pentax/Samsung. So, loaded with what I believed to be good information, we purchased the Samsung over all of the competition because it had the features and reported image quality we were looking for. At the time, the Samsung had a lower price than the Pentax version, so we went with it.
WOW!......It's been over 20 years since I used an SLR, so I'm relearning everything as I go, but I must say I'm just blown away by this camera. Straight out of the box, our Minolta will take better pics, but that can be said of just about every SLR on the market. These are not point & shoot cameras even though they do have auto functions. If you want the superior images, you're going to have to work a bit at it. However, if you take the time to learn and apply the proper techniques, you'll be amazed at what you can create.
The Samsung offers seemingly infinite possibilities. I'm having fun just shooting objects over and over again at different settings to learn it's capabilities (one of the great things about digital photography, no wasted film). I've taken it to the mountains to test my new skills and have come away with enlargeable and frameable images like I've never taken before. I've also tried to create situations that others have voiced issues with when using the competition, but have not found any situation that can't be captured beautifully with the right settings.
Compared to a P&S, this camera is an extreme amount of work, it's heavy and a lot more expensive.....I just wish I'd bought it sooner. I'll never go back to a P&S again after experiencing the quality of the Samsung (Pentax).

Samsung GX-10 is an excellent DSLR (if not one of the best)on the market, technologically and value-wise. Based on Pentax technology, this modfied DSLR is full of technical options only available in higher-priced cameras. The solid (sealed construction) feel of the camera should be an added asset. I recommend this camera to anyone, including serious photographers.

This is a heck of a camera for the price paid (I hate to say it but even at the current price it's a steal). To start off, you can use all the pentax AF lenses made virtually in the past 50 years and don't need adapters. You can use 95% of the MF ones without adapters as well. And these are VERY high quality lenses. You get them really cheap. For example, you can get a stunning high quality 70-210mm AF (autofocus) lens made by pentax (takumar) for less than $70. The slightly better one (pentax-F version) 70-210mm can be had for about $150. It has silky smooth background or bokeh (9 blades) and sharper than a lot of the prime (fixed focus) lenses, boosting 3.4 MTF rating (normalized to 5). If you use this camera body along with a Tamron 28-75/2.8 XR DI for pentax mount, you have a higher quality hardware set than Nikon or Canon even with their best glasses, for about 1/5 the cost, for indoor/wedding photography. Of course, this assumes you have the know-how and shooting in RAW, to be fair (no pro would shoot in JPG doing wedding portraits in their right minds). I am no pro and this camera is more than enough for all my needs, by the way. My 3rd most favored lens would be my pentax-f 50mm/1.7 AF. I wished I have access to the same 1.4 version that rumored to be slightly better (I do have current AF pentax FA 50mm/1.4 but prefer the old 1.7).

Of course, you know the rest about this camera, in body shake reduction, weather seal etc. The only down side of this, is the slow AF under low light. But for me, this is not that big of a problem. (I use MF to take photos of my kids running around me)

To anyone looking at getting this camera, don't worry, it's a great camera. It is almost a twin of the Pentax K10D camera. Everything the same except that the battery grip for the K10D does not fit this camera well. You can do a search on this topic. And the problem is that Samsung does not sell its battery grip in the USA yet. So if the grip is really important to you ,consider the Pentax. Other than that, this is one fantastic camera, I love it. Dale